On June 19, Mr. Tran Quang Lam - Director of Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction - said that the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council is expected to pass a resolution to exempt bus tickets for people from July 1 to the end of 2026, with a total support budget of about 665 billion VND.
In the immediate future, the city will apply a free policy for 135 inter-provincial bus routes, thereby increasing people's access to services and creating motivation to switch to public transport.
According to Mr. Tran Quang Lam, along with the ticket price support policy, the city is continuing to promote vehicle conversion towards green - clean - modern, while upgrading infrastructure, stops and improving service quality, in order to improve people's experience when using buses and public transport.
Ho Chi Minh City's public transport system currently includes Metro Line No. 1 (Ben Thanh - Suoi Tien) and 180 bus routes. Out of a total of 2,432 operating buses, 1,649 use electricity or environmentally friendly fuels.
The city aims to complete the conversion of 100% of inter-provincial buses to green energy by the beginning of 2027, thereby continuing to maintain the leading position in Southeast Asia in terms of the rate of environmentally friendly buses.
At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City's public transport system is being strongly digitized. The city has completed the deployment of an electronic ticket system on inter-provincial bus routes, connecting with Metro Line 1 through a cashless payment solution.
The system is currently applied on 135 bus routes with more than 1,982 vehicles, and is also deployed at 14 Metro Line 1 stations.
People can pay and authenticate when using public transport in many forms such as EMV bank cards (Mastercard, Visa, NAPAS and soon JCB, AMEX), e-wallets, citizen identification cards, VNeID applications or QR codes.
This system is gradually being interconnected between buses, metro, river buses and public bicycles, towards a unified and convenient public transport ecosystem.
In that context, the MultiGo application has become a central tool to support people to access services. The application is currently available on iOS and Android, has reached more than 200,000 installations with over 100,000 daily searches.
MultiGo allows users to look up the itinerary, track the time the car arrives at the station, find directions, reflect service quality, identify students to enjoy incentives and make online payments.
Not only stopping at buses and the metro, MultiGo also integrates the city's public transport ecosystem such as river buses, public bicycles and MultiPass cards to serve interconnected payments. This is considered an important step in the digitalization process of urban traffic management and operation.
According to the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction, the increasing number of people using MultiGo and choosing public transport will contribute to improving the operation efficiency of the system, increasing the rate of public passenger transport, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, limiting congestion and aiming for the goal of building a civilized, modern and sustainable city.
